Gail Alexan­der

Sev­er­al per­sons-fe­male and male-are un­der con­sid­er­a­tion for the post of CN­MG chair­man, af­ter last week's res­ig­na­tion of ex-chair­man Bri­an Stone, gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials said on Sat­ur­day. Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, In­for­ma­tion Min­is­ter Su­ruj Ram­bachan con­firmed rec­om­men­da­tions have been made to the Gov­ern­ment's state board com­mit­tee which is head­ed by the Prime Min­is­ter and an ap­point­ment is "im­mi­nent." Oth­er Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials told the Guardian that the com­mit­tee is ex­pect­ed to meet lat­er this week.

Sev­er­al peo­ple un­der con­sid­er­a­tion in­clude long-stand­ing fe­male me­dia prac­ti­tion­ers, well-known top lev­el pri­vate sec­tor ex­ec­u­tives and a re­cent­ly re­tired pub­lish­ing chief ex­ec­u­tive. Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials have made it clear that the suc­cess­ful can­di­date for a key state en­ter­prise such as CN­MG must pos­sess a com­bi­na­tion of proven top man­age­ment and clin­i­cal as­sess­ment skills, dy­namism and cut­ting-edge mar­ket savvy geared to CN­MG's cur­rent sta­tus and goals.

The can­di­date, they added, would al­so have to be geared specif­i­cal­ly to treat with CN­MG's par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion, raise its pro­file and rat­ings and es­pe­cial­ly re­store cred­i­bil­i­ty fol­low­ing months of loss of per­son­nel from the sta­tion. This has in­clud­ed loss of me­dia work­ers, ad­min­is­tra­tive staff and one board mem­ber. Stone re­signed last week, say­ing he had planned re­sign­ing since last year due to a "grow­ing" con­flict of in­ter­est re­gard­ing his po­si­tion with the state-owned me­dia en­ti­ty and his role as a UNC par­ty ac­tivist.